Ugh because numbers in Perl are floating point by default. If you read perldoc perlop and perldoc integer you'd see this. As for references, sounds like you lack the knowledge. Anybody who learsn references in Perl knows how to dereference them. If you can't figure out how to dereference or when to, then you shouldn't be playing with references let alone worrying about how to defrerence. Sounds like you don't know about design, while Perl code can get ugly it's still easy to design good code. As for readability, http://perltidy.sf.net.